The short version:-

I’ve sort of broke my foot.

sergiok @ Flickr

The long version:-

On friday night I stood on one of the kids wooden building blocks. I didn’t think much of it at the time as I basically went straight to bed afterwards but when I woke up the next morning it was a wee bit nippy. As the day wore on it gradually got sorer and sorer and about the only time I wasn’t in pain was when I was lying/sitting down or when I was standing still. Any movement in the food just caused me to wince in pain and hobble about. I thought it was a sprain or bruised tendon or something so I wasn’t that worried by it.

By the time Saturday night came along I managed to hobble from the carpark right outside Tesco at Silverburn to Wagamama but I could feel something grinding inside my foot. It wasn’t sore as such but it is the strangest feeling. Imagine two slightly deflated balloons or two blocks of polystyrene rubbing together. That’s the feeling inside my foot. It’s weird. I basically decided that unless it was greatly improved on Sunday morning I was going to head to the hospital to get it checked out. I managed to get Vonnie’s anniversary present before I couldn’t walk anymore which was a bonus but I must have spent about three and a half hours in A&E getting my foot seen to. I felt a bit of a fraud as the boy in front of me came in with a broken ankle and the girl behind me with a broken leg. The fact I could hobble from the exam room to the X-Ray room had me convinced there was nothing wrong. Vonnie turned up not long after I’d been X-Rayed and it turns out I’ve got a stress fracture of my fourth metatarsal or something like that. I’ve to go to see an orthopaedic doctor at 8.30am.

Considering I’m watching the Superbowl at the moment and it’s after midnight already I’m going to be in hell when I wake up.

The past few days have been hellishly hard work. At the beginning of the week Vonnie went to see the doctor who told her among other things she had a viral ear infection which was causing her headaches and sore throats. On Wednesday night Vonnie had trouble breathing and collapsed meaning she ended up with the paramedics out and a trip to A&E in the back of an ambulance. It turns out she has a really bad case of tonsillitis and has been put on a pile of drugs to get her better.

This morning we woke up and for the first time in about a week Vonnie actually felt positive about the day and was able to get up and not be in that much pain. Our respective parents were popping in to see the kids so we planned a relatively quiet day once we’d tidied the living room up a bit. Then the parents arrived and our son turned from a happy wee boy into this.

He’s excitable. He’s noisey. He won’t do a damn thing he’s told. And that’s before he even gets anywhere near the sweets. Even when he’s not fighting for his grandparents attention he is loud without an off switch. He talks to himself or when he’s alone he’ll just whitter random noises but there certainly isn’t an off switch. He becomes that hard work that Vonnie was completely and utterly shattered by the time our parents left to go home and it’s been a constant battle with him for the rest of the evening.

His speech therapy assessment went really well. Apparently problem cases are flagged if they have something like more than three percent of their normal chat being effected by stutters, stammers or repetition. I think Nairn comes in at just over two percent so they don’t see it as a major problem but he’s to go back in five months for a check. He’s got so many things going on that check of boxes for autism, ADHD and dyslexia that I don’t know if it’s just my parental desire for there to be nothing wrong that makes me think it’s just a kid thing. From getting my own ‘diagnosis’ with regards to dyslexia last year I know that if any of them do turn out to be a problem for him none of them are severe enough to really cause him much bother but it would allow us to target those problems to help him and ourselves.

I guess time will tell.

Today started so well. We had prepared the veg for tonight’s dinner last night and Vonnie managed to get everything thrown together and into the slow cooker with ease this morning. It wasn’t until I started loading the tumble dryer that things started going wrong. I’m not pointing any elbows but someone took all the metal BBQ skewers and put them on top of the tumble dryer in such a way that one of them was sticking over the side and pointing right at me as I bent down. I don’t know how but I managed to just miss my eye by about a centimetre and I’m now the proud owner of a inch long scrape that looked quite nasty at the time. This combined with a few other things meant that I was late for work.

Lunchtime came around and off I went to the pet shop to buy a new filter for the fish tank. Literally 20 seconds after I left my desk to start the long walk down the office to the main stair well one of my colleagues shouted after me whilst holding the phone. It was a bit unusual as normally if it’s work related they’d take a message and if it’s Vonnie she’d just ring my mobile phone. I started walking back when she said that it was my wife and my daughter had been in an accident. I remember starting to run but not actually running. I picked up the phone and found my wife almost in tears on the other end trying to explain that Erica had fell in a coffee shop and had hurt her head. An ambulance had been called, there was blood everywhere and could I get money from my mum, she works in the same office, and get a taxi straight to Accident and Emergency at the Southern General where I would meet up with them.

I remember someone asking if everything was OK but I have no idea if I answered them as I’d turned around to my boss and basically said that Erica had really hurt herself and that I was getting a taxi to A&E, I had no idea how serious it was but that it sounded bad and that I’d let him know what was going on as soon as I did but that I wouldn’t be back in today. I ran across to the local hospital to use their cash machine and was standing waiting on the taxi when Vonnie phoned with an update. Apparently the bleeding had stopped but the ambulance still hadn’t appeared and just in case I passed by the shopping centre they were in before it did turn up I was to call as I was passing. It turned out we went nowhere near there however.

The taxi turned up only for the driver to not have a clue where A&E was at the Southern General, it’s quite a big hospital and I got lost in it’s grounds when Nairn was being induced so I couldn’t blame him, but we headed off down through the town rather than along the motorway. Eventually the ambulance turned up and they patched her up and started taking her to Yorkhill which is the sick kids hospital in Glasgow so another phone call later I had redirected the taxi and actually turned up before the ambulance arrived. That’s not bad going. I still didn’t really know how bad Erica was at that point so I actually thought the change of destination was something the ambulance crew decided upon because of her condition rather than it’s what they do as standard when its a young child within the catchment area. Running into A&E and heading straight for the reception desk not knowing where your child is isn’t something I want to repeat any time soon. Especially when they had no knowledge of her and it was only after some searching by the desk clerk that we found out that she was still in the ambulance on her way. If they treat young children with head wounds as a priority, which they do apparently, how did I manage to travel from East Kilbride after waiting on a taxi, take a few wrong turns as we tried to get off the Clydeside Expressway and up to the hospital and still get there 10 minutes before the vehicle that even without it’s blues and two’s going other cars make way for. I ended up standing outside the receiving doors waiting for any and every ambulance coming in just in case it was them. At one point i started to convince myself that I’d picked Vonnie up wrong and that they were actually going to the Southern General but that soon passed.

Pretty soon after all this doubt their ambulance drew up and I got a nod from the driver with a thumb pointed in the back so I knew this was the right one. The rear doors opened and Erica’s face lit up when she seen me. Just beforehand they had been having trouble keeping her awake but when Vonnie started trying to get a photo to send to me Erica started shouting ‘CHEESE’ and smiling.

Once we got her inside I finally got the full story about what had happened as the triage nurse went through the story. Erica had been jumping on a chair as kids do all the time but this time she tripped and fell towards the table. She had put her hands out to stop herself but she missed and her forehead took the full force of the impact on the corner of the table. My sister-in-law, Stephanie, picked her up and noone thought anything of it other than it might be a bad bruise the next day. Then Vonnie seen the dent in her forehead and realised she could see bone. Then it started filling with blood and wouldn’t stop. Vonnie panicked as any mother would and a bystander phoned an ambulance for them all the while Stephanie was trying to stop Vonnie from seeing just how bad it was. Once the ambulance turned up she helped take the kids to her mothers and as she left the coffee shop a waiter at a neighbouring restaurant asked her if she needed any first aid help or a bandage. She hadn’t realised that one side of her tee-shirt was drenched in Erica’s blood.

Anyway back at the hospital Erica had started to perk up a little and the doctor we seen went through the options with us for repairing the wound. We could have the temporary paper stitches the paramedic had put on redone, we could have it glued shut or we could have traditional staple/stiches put in. In actual fact the doctor was reluctant to do anything as the paramedic had done such a good job, he didn;t like using glue on faces and to redo the stiches in anyway would probably just cause more harm and stress to Erica. He went through the points to be aware of with head injuries in young kids and sent us on our way safe in the knowledge that if Erica was to regress and get worse all we have to do is get her straight back down there and they’d see her straight away.

It was on the taxi to go get the other kids that she fell asleep but since she woke up she’s been the life and soul of the party. She went to bed early though and I’m just about to go check on her to make sure she’s doing OK. It does mean we are having to put Nairn into nursery for the next few days to help her wound heal up and that she probably won’t be going to Beth’s birthday party now but it’s a small price to pay for something that could have been a lot worse.

Vonnie’s take on today can be found here.